On Tues. 4 Oct. Bill Croft asked about a Macintosh string manipulation
program that operates on text files. Bare Bones Software has just released
BBEdit 3.0:
an elegant little program well worth looking at. The freeware BBEdit Lite
3.0 and the demo version of the full(commercial) program are available at
info-mac mirror sites. The commercial version is $99.
For more info contact < bbeditworld.std.com >
Cheers,
Hugh Nicoll, Miyazaki Municipal University hnicollfunatsuka.miyazaki-mu.ac.jp

Marge Jackman asks:
>Is there any difference between someone, somebody; anyone anybody.
>no one, nobody?
I'm looking forward to seeing other replies but my own not very interesting
reaction is that the forms in -body are the normal ones for an oral/informal
register and the ones in -one are normal for a formal/written register. i've
noticed this only because i find myself changing -body to -one in the writing
of students of mine who are fluent in english but not native speakers. also,
presumably because of the register clash, i find 1 seriously weird and 2
normal, and 3 normal and 4 somewhat weird:
1. ???everybody brought his wife.
2. everybody brought their wife.
3. everyone brought his wife.
4. ?everyone brought their wife.
(i purposely made the predicate appropriate of males only, to avoid the issue
of ideologically based gender-related preferences.)
anybody (???anyone) out there have the same intuitions?

I have already received a lot of mail in response to my latest
posting, all of it saying basicallly the same thing: that there
IS pretty much of a consensus not to accept anything older than
Afro-Asiatic. Let me try to clarify the issue once more.
I accept the fact that most linguists have not accepted anything
older than Afro-Asiatic, and it is possible that we never will
(but it is also possible that we might). However--
there is a difference between saying that America has not been
discovered (or its discovery remains controversial) and saying
that America in principle cannot be discovered with the available
technology. The first was true in the 1490's, but the second was
false. Similarly, it is true to say that any hypothetical ancestor
of Afro-Asiatic (and any putative relatives of AA) has not been
established beyond controversy; it is emphatically untrue (and
worse) to say that there is an in principle limit on the comparative
method which makes the discovery of such an ancestor impossible even
in theory.
Alexis Manaster Ramer

Al-Kasey's "to go and do" something is not at all unusual in U.S.
English.
Cormack's *go picking blackberries not allowed, of course, but "She
went to picking blackberries" is, in the sense of "to begin" to do
something. This latter exqamples also applies to Salkie's comments.
DDH